The Weekside: 73 and 60 – an ode to the best night in NBA regular season history

The biggest bias in media is not people knowingly pushing an agenda. It is towards importance. Everybody who spends their hours, days, and weeks — perhaps even careers — covering something wants it to be important. It is incredibly difficult to not elevate the subject in your own mind.

In the NBA, we see this in many ways, but one clear one is in end-of-season award voting. There may be local writers who are actually “homers,” but skewed voting is more often born from a media member being too close to a player and falsely believing that those accomplishments that he saw up close were more meaningful than those of another, more-deserving candidate. When you know more of the back story, combine an understanding of a player’s personal struggle with their on-court feats, and watch them much more than others, it’s a recipe for losing perspective.

This phenomenon infuses everything. Beat writers and local media workers overstate things about the teams they cover without trying to. It just comes with the territory of being overly close and wanting what you’re writing about to be meaningful. This applies to the overall quality of a player — Jae Crowder pops to mind, Boston — but just as much as in the little things.

A three-game losing streak is the end of times and carries with it larger significance than the three-game losing streak of another team. It shows the softness inherent to the team’s flawed composition and leadership dynamics.

A local player’s late-game free-throw misses aren’t just the small-size randomness of throwing a round ball at a metal hoop. They are symptomatic of something larger, deeper that a radio host has uncovered due to an grand talent for psychoanalyzing other humans despite never studying that subject academically.

This generally applies to everyone as well, not just folks in the media.

The vast majority of people like the music and movies that they liked when they were younger, for example. These were their formative years — before 9 to 5s, kids, credit cards, and health concerns took over their lives — when they had time to devote mental energy towards opinion making. They really dug into the concepts and deeper meaning that exists in these works. They thought about it more intently, perhaps with the aid of thought-enhancing substances, and discussed with friends how the themes perfectly align with their life experience.

Then their tastes stop evolving, and they no longer have time in life for such trivialities. So the sounds and scenes from those days become further embedded into their memories than anything that comes later. Those things then stand out more in their minds, creating a lasting significance that forever feel more important than it really deserves to.

Nirvana wasn’t just a good band. They meant something — in a way that kids today with their Kanye records could never understand. Movies back then explained the world — while today’s directors are just in it for the money.

Really, this phenomenon is the only way to explain why people think movies made in the 1980s are anything other than complete garbage. (Die Hard, Predator, Airplane! and Back to the Future notwithstanding.)

In sports, this importance bias — and as it intertwines with something of a greatness bias and a uniqueness bias — is always present. We want to think we are watching unique, original, mind-blowing, never-conceived-of-before performances by athletes who are capable of feats that neither our forefathers nor future generations could believe.

Usually we aren’t. But we want to be.

That allure is hard to divorce yourself from mentally, however. How great would it be if, in the history of sport, you were able to watch, write about, and perhaps even interview the greatest athlete of all time? Going back to the days of gladiators and forward to the year 2722, nothing in sport has been or ever will be this great. And you got to watch it.

It’s a nice little dream. It’s probably not true. But it’s nice.

And it is this, as much as anything, that makes players like Oscar Robertson and Scottie Pippen sound like grumpy old haters who belong in a Muppets balcony.

If Michael Jordan and those 1990’s Bulls teams were the greatest ever, Scottie has a better life story. If the 1996-97 Bulls were so good that they would sweep the current Warriors, as Pippen said, then he didn’t just play for an amazing team for its era, as Bill Russell, Clyde Frazier, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird did. He did something unique in history. His stories, memories, and individual accomplishments are all the more significant.

The same goes for Oscar. If the current era of players are not as good as earlier players were, then it means he was there for something important. He isn’t just a pioneer. He was arguably the best player of the best era, and his stats mean more than Steph Curry’s stats. Points come cheap today when an imaginary line can increase the value of your shot after all.

It should also go without saying that these old men don’t pay attention to the NBA as much as they once did. They have lives, and when you are one of the best 30 players in history, how interesting can it be to watch the Blazers play the Mavericks on a Tuesday night in November? They are rich people, so they likely have League Pass. But are they watching it? Are they aware of the statistical leaders in anything but points, rebound, and assists? Have they even kept up with modern discourse enough to know what now-basic terms like net rating or usage rate mean?

No, Scottie and Oscar aren’t stupid. They are just deluded, as we all are, by wanting something to be more important than it is. They are your friend who still listens to Stone Temple Pilots as their 13-year-old son rolls his eyes in the backseat of the Prius. They are the people who can’t believe you never saw Blade Runner then force you to watch it as you sit there bored and try to politely tell them, “Sure, I mean, it was O.K.”

These current Golden State Warriors and Steph Curry are as good — or better — than anything that has ever been seen in the NBA. Remove the mythos of Mike and the nonsensical idea that players today aren’t, on average, way better than they were at any time in human history, and this is obvious.

And then a day will come where another team is just as good — or better — than these Warriors. Another player will be just as good — or better — than Steph. But there is no honor in overstating what the past was in order to devalue the present.

The vividness of your memories and that nostalgic wonder don’t mean the teams you watched as a kid are better than the teams today. And the teams we’re watching today won’t necessarily be better than those your kids watch. Basketball just keeps evolving and players just keep improving.

But from wins to stats to the eye test to changing the sport to making the outlandish seem ordinary, the 2015-16 Warriors are the best to ever do it.

At least for now.

Power Rankings

5. Kevin Martin

Lean back.

4. Boban

When a 6’6″, 220-pound man jumps on your back and you don’t hardly notice.

3. Tim Duncan

He often is accused of having a personality like a robot, so it is fitting that he would pay tribute to his android friends in dance.

2. Andre Miller

“I’m just tying my shoe here, guys. Why are we all gathering around?”

1. Boris Diaw

Boris Diaw will go to space one day and just out-jumped your guard in some Gucci flip flops.

Now he is doing this. Boris should be in the Hall of Fame already.

Words With Friends

This week’s five must-read articles about the NBA. Excerpts here — click through to read the full piece.

1. Six head coaching candidates to watch this summer
by  Kevin Arnovitz, ESPN

The hiring wave of the past few years has produced a fair share of coaching talent: the top two vote-getters for 2015’s coach of the year award, Steve Kerr and Mike Budenholzer, to name just a couple. At the same time, only seven current coaches have held their positions longer than three seasons, and 10 coaches have been fired in the past year. Teams may have refined their criteria for what they want in a head coach, but on balance they don’t seem any better at finding it.

2. The Last True Days of Kobe Bryant
by  Baxter Holmes, ESPN

Jamison and guard Chris Duhon would stare at their teammate, the star, slumped over in his locker, crumbling. Game after game, the cycle repeated, and after each one, Jamison, inches away from the haggard soul packed in ice, knew it wouldn’t last, knew disaster loomed. “Man,” Jamison believed, “there’s no way this guy is going to make it.”

3. Welcome, Visitors. Squeeze Right In.
by  Scott Cacciola, New York Times

Visiting locker rooms remain one of the great variables with divergent setups across the league. Size, furnishings, urinal access — it all depends on the city … The visiting locker room at the Palace [of Auburn Hills, where the Pistons play] is a glorified broom closet. But the slow, steady expansion of coaching and training staffs over the years has only made the space feel more confined. Whenever the Warriors are in town, Adams said, it requires a coordinated effort for them to share the limited supply of shower stalls. “It’s not like you write it out on paper,” [Warriors assistant coach Ron] Adams said, “but there is a system that has been developed out of necessity.” That assumes the showers are operational. After the Wizards won a game at the Palace this season, the players discovered that there was no hot water, [Jared] Dudley said. As payback, they were tempted to turn off the water on the Pistons when they made a subsequent trip to Washington. “At least we won, so we were happy,” the Wizards’ [Garrett] Temple said. “If you lose, you’re throwing a tantrum.”

4. Russell Westbrook Is The Greatest Triple-Double Machine In Recorded History
by Andrew Flowers, FiveThirtyEight

Russell Westbrook is a force of nature. Westbrook has wreaked havoc on opposing NBA teams, piling up 17 triple-doubles so far this season, which ties Magic Johnson’s 1988-89 season for the most in the last 33 years. Westbrook sucks opposing defenses into the paint before dishing to Kevin Durant, Serge Ibaka or a Thunder shooter waiting in the corner. Or he can just score it himself. Westbrook was last season’s scoring leader and is this season’s No. 2 in assists. While averaging 24 and 10, he’s also having one of the greatest rebounding seasons ever for a guard — without the aid of deferential bigs on the team.

5. The legend of the Swamp Dragons
by Zach Lowe, ESPN

“We had no redeemable history. We had never won anything, and our name — it was like calling the Yankees the ‘New York Second Bases.’ The team never had a chance with that name.” … “Everybody likes dragons. Dragons are cool. They always will be.” … “I thought he was kidding.” …  “I thought, ‘Oh, cool, I get to draw a dragon!’ They said, ‘No, a swamp dragon.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ I didn’t give a whole of thought to the swamp. I was just excited to draw a dragon. I called him Swampy.”

Kobe Was What to Watch

When they ask you why you watch, why you waste so much of your life staring a TV screen, why you spend money you don’t have on tickets to games you cannot afford.

When they ask why you stay up too late to see meaningless January games on the West Coast that end way past your bedtime.

When they roll their eyes because you’ve memorized every stat and know every player’s jersey number and which man makes which amount of money.

When they tell you, “I know there isn’t really only two minutes left” and don’t let you forget about your how late you were.

When they wonder why you can’t stop checking the score on your phone or looking at Twitter when everybody else’s boyfriend is enjoying their dinner and laughing politely at table-side banter.

When they say, “Wait, it was such a beautiful day and you didn’t even leave your house?” because there was a Sunday triple-header header on that superseded sunshine.

When they put efficiency and shot selection above all else and show you a mathematical rationale for why mid-range jumpers are worse than texting and driving.

When they break out the clutch shooting stats and try to squash the thrill of your memories.

When they make even you wonder if all these hours, days, weeks, years spent watching people throw a ball through a cylinder was time well spent.

When they shake their head after you say you can’t hang out this weekend because you have eight playoffs games to watch on the opening weekend of the NBA playoffs.

Show them Kobe’s final game.

And if they still don’t get it, then they just don’t get it.